turtle diaries

It is estimated that you have three or four hours in a life to make sense of it.

'This too, my brief light, maybe it had flashed across the darkness long long ago.'

Very rarely , you think to yourself, can you say: 'I let my mind be where it was.' Can we accept: 'everything was what it was.'

He looked in the mirror at an angle, stopped in his tracks by the thought that at any moment it can stop; he would write of his day, or off his day. Already the presence of 'of' creates the necessary distance, even though the tone isn't quite right.

'Winter grey skies, winter early evenings, make London small. Not to be grasped by the mind, not to be held in the eye.' This is not a world, this is not a way to live. Perhaps. But the small place, the low light, the small flame was a kind of refuge after all, and if not lived 'to the full' then at least without questioning or recrimination, like a second childhood that comes to one with age. An accommodation to the distinct likelihood that there would be no revelatory moment, no finding, no perfect sense or clear pattern, just the few days strung together and held, yes, held against the blank spaces.

'It never seemed really dark until I came into the house.'

~~

Little r found a 'Y' stick on the ground yesterday. I told her that the aboriginals use it to detect if there's water in the desert. We moved along trying ourselves until she came to a discarded bottle of water with a mouthful of water still in it. Eureka!

She has the habit of keeping the things she likes safe in a  cupboard, scampering towards that special place to store the little treasures she finds: a subbuteo player from the 80s, a feather, a coffee bean that I stole from the department machine, a rainbow-coloured elastic band, an old photograph of my aunt-who she couldn't remember meeting. 

How we collect things, gather them to ourselves, hoping that time will not be time for a while whilst in our heart of hearts we know that it must all pass, like the grey clouds of London that you love. Under the grey clouds everyone is lost, which is why there are so many bridges!

What will you write of today? I read the first page of black beauty to little r. The horses's mother says to beauty: don't bite, even in play. Which, remarkably, is something that I always say to her. When I told her this she stormed off with her nose in the air, all uppity. Then she raised her hand-the brat-and said: "do you want me to get the belt?!". I nearly keeled over laughing but since that isn't my way, the keeling was expressed in a slight tilting of the head and the narrowing of my eyes. There are moments that make up a diary/a life-whether it is worth noting them or not is always questionable. 

The green ocean of time, Bellow's Venetian green bottles...There is some freedom out there, you're sure of it, some mode of recovery, but it rests in being small, hidden, unbothered by the modern world or any other generalization.